It's Not Just Apple: Google Hates Flash Too

While Apple's battle with Adobe over Flash gets all the headlines, Flash's troubles, especially for web developers lie even deeper.

When we at OMGPOP built our website, not just our games, entirely in Flash we did so to provide a rich, differentiated environment around our games. While it looks great, every day we are punished for using Flash.

Why?

Performance: Flash is slow and buggy, and updates are slow to roll out. The performance of Flash is the single biggest cause of customer complaints. In fact, if you have Windows 7 and the newest cool computer, I regret to inform you that Adobe Flash Player is not supported for playback in 64-bit browsers and is available for 64-bit form only in an Adobe Labs version for Linux. Oops.

SEO: This is the biggest one. Google, at the end of the day, also hates Flash. Running an all flash environment is SEO death. Flash websites are simply too complicated for Google's spiders to actually understand. Google sees the internet primarily in text - flash, and other scripts are ignored.

So while you might be tempted to feel sorry for Adobe for being picked on by Steve Jobs, the reality is he's the only one expressing an opinion. Google basically hates flash as well. As we at OMGPOP and others on the web continue to struggle with SEO and performance around Flash, I remain surprised at how poorly Adobe is responding to any of this. It's almost like they don't even care.

Dan Porter is CEO of games site OMGPOP. He is also an investor in songkick, producteev, linguabyte and socialflow. You can follow him on twitter at @tfadp and find him at www.danporter.org